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UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 89
setting, the trials of Oscar Wilde were the first to be staged as a public spectacle.
The recoding and transfiguration of the sodomite into the homosexual
accomplished in the trials accompanied a similar transfiguration of the nature of
the legal process itself. Both the trials and the sign of homosexual identity took
on the nature of an educational exercise, a public moral lesson that differed from
the canonical treatment of the sodomite. Foucault sees the role of publicity as
making
The meaning…clear to all; each element…must speak, repeat the crime,
recall the law, show the need for punishment and justify its degree.
Posters, placards, signs, symbols must be distributed, so that everyone may
learn their significations. The publicity of punishment must not have the
physical effect of terror; it must open up a book to be read…the
punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book
rather than a ceremony.
(1979:111)
The publicity upon which the trials depended for their didactic purposes, as
Foucault has taught, could not simultaneously be an instrument of terror. The
terroristic and prohibitive functions that would have been possible through a
display of Wilde’s punishment were superseded by the transmission of the
narrative upon which cultural education was dependent. In the case of the Wilde
trials, the goal was the containment of his transgressive reinscription under the
Name-of-the-Homosexual, thus their primary function was to enter the new sign
into cultural circulation. That the sign of homosexual identity was a new one, and
that it was unavoidably molded in the image of Wilde himself, can be shown by
the fact that for the several years after the trials the word “Oscar” was
synonymous with “Homosexual” and was the public’s first label for the newly
constructed sign (Harris 144).
Whereas the press constructed the trials as a lesson in morals for the general
public, the events served a different educational purpose for those who were
engaging in homosexual behavior. Rather than discouraging same-sex sexual
activity, the publicity produced “an ever-open book,” a blueprint for signification
of a social identity. For sodomites, witnessing the crucifixion of Wilde provided
an “acknowledgment of a likeness, that guide[d] them toward that identity”
(Koestenbaum 187). As Havelock Ellis uneasily observed:
The Oscar Wilde trial, with its wide publicity…appears to have generally
contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to the
manifestations of homosexuality, and to have aroused inverts to take up a
definite attitude. I have been assured in several quarters that this is so and
that since that case the manifestations of homosexuality have become more
pronounced.
(212)